Wednesday 12 January 2022

MATHEMATICS AND MYSTIQUE

The text below is part of a collection of essays found in the book Ídolos ou Ideal? (Portuguese only), by Huberto Rohden, the first edition of 1961, represents fragments of separate thoughts about God, man and the universe, without the pretension of being a homogeneous whole or with a logical sequence of ideas. The reader can open the book on any page and have the privilege of savouring lucid concepts about the philosophy of life. Some of them resulted from his studies in 1945 when he was awarded a scholarship at Princeton University, USA. During this time, he had a temporary relationship with Albert Einstein until 1946.

As a philosopher, educator, profoundly religious and mystic, he left in his writings a legacy that lives on to this day and is timeless. However, some mathematical concepts, a science that advances dynamically, may be part of a time past, but which in its entirety clearly shows the intimate relationship between mathematics and mystique.

According to Rohden, “Everything perceived by the senses is material. The material, however, is three-dimensional. All material bodies have three dimensions: line, plane, cube - length, width, thickness.

The point is not a material body because it has no dimension, nor does it exist as such.

The point is the beginning of the line before it moves in one direction.

The line exists only as a limitation to a plan.

The plan also exists only as a limitation of a cube.

And will the cube exist in itself? Without being intimately united in some other dimension, beyond the well-known three-dimensionality? Is not the three-dimensional the limitation of something ultra-dimensional, not dimensional? The classic five human senses culminate in the extreme frontier of the three-dimensional world. Still, it would be absurd to suppose that the real world begins with three-dimensionality - it would be the same as saying that human knowledge ends in kindergarten or primary school.

Therefore, it can be said that what exists is only perceptible as an attribute of the imperceptible creator; the part is only known as an aspect of an unknown Whole.

A similar thing happens in the metaphysical world.

No one can know the part without being aware of the Whole.

And it is precisely here that the great mystery begins: how can one get a sense of the Whole before knowing its parts? Is not the Whole the sum total of the parts?

If so, one could not have experience of the Whole except for the sum of the parts.

The Whole is not the sum of the parts, it is not a synthesis of antitheses, but it is the thesis prior to any antithesis and synthesis. It is not a set of components, but it is prior to this because the Whole is simple, absolute, revealing and manifests itself in different parts, but does not break into parts. The word “part”, in this case, is inaccurate because the Whole has no parts. Worlds are not parts or sparks of God, as the poets say. It would be better to say that the worlds are like the thoughts of the great thinker (God). The thought is not a part of the thinker but a partial manifestation of it.

The Whole of the divine essence is revealed, without ceasing, in its existences, the worlds, or effects, but these existential worlds are not God, but only finite reflections or manifestations of the great Infinite Reality which is immanent in all existences.

Divine transcendence is infinitely beyond all of its finite immanence’s, just as Universal Life is in each of the individual lives that emanate from it and remain in it, but the sum total of living individuals is not the Universal Life; this is prior to their individual manifestations and will be after all of them.

The famous question about the “Origin of Life” is philosophically inconsequential, based on a false premise, since there is no origin of life, life as such has no origin. It is essentially eternal, self-existent, and autonomous because it is the Cosmic Reality itself, the Great Whole, God.

For a man to have the intuition of the Whole before knowing the parts, he must overcome the limitations of the analytical processes of intelligence, which only knows parts; it must go deeper into the ocean of spiritual vision, which comes in direct contact with the Essence, the Real, the Whole, for analytical knowledge fails if it is not based on cosmic intuition; only the simultaneous view of the Whole explains the successive analysis of the parts.

The parts are only comprehensible through their foundation, the Whole.

Mystique is cosmic mathematics.”

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